자본주의 사회주의 대안적 경제 은퇴후: Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy by Kohei Saito

Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy by Kohei Saito | Goodreads

Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

by Kohei Saito, 斎藤幸平

4.14 · Rating details · 49 ratings · 10 reviews

Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx's writings

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world's most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a "Promethean." According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance--a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright.

Kohei Saito's Karl Marx's Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx's ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx's central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks--published only recently and still being translated--Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. "It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx's] critique of political economy," Saito writes, "if one ignores its ecological dimension."

Saito's book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes--crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx's Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world. (less)

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Hardcover, 368 pages

Published October 24th 2017 by Monthly Review Press (first published 2017)

ISBN1583676414 (ISBN13: 9781583676417)

Edition LanguageEnglish

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Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

O ecossocialismo de Karl Marx: Capitalismo, natureza e a crítica inacabada à economia política

Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Karl Marx's ecosocialism: capitalism, nature, and the unfinished critique of political economy

Natur gegen Kapital: Marx' Ökologie in seiner unvollendeten Kritik des Kapitalismus

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Rhys

Jul 10, 2019Rhys rated it really liked it

A very interesting and well written book on the historical material condition in Marx's thought, and it is an important addition to the emerging ecosocialist movement.

"Recently, some ecosocialists, in contrast to Marx, have come to stress the 'monistic synthesis' of society and nature: “Not the separation from, but the terms of humanity’s place within nature, is crucial to understanding the conditions of capitalist renewal (if any) and crisis.” However, this understanding overlooks Marx’s original insight that the constitutive condition of the capitalist regime is the separation of humans from nature. The unity of humanity and nature exists transhistorically from an abstract general perspective, in that human labor not only always modifies nature, but is also a part of nature and conditioned by it. What Marx’s analysis shows is the historical deformation of the relationship between humans and nature in modern capitalist society, which is based on the alienation of nature. Marx investigates, as the primary task of his political economy, how this material condition of social production is transformed and deformed under capitalistically constituted social relations" (p.258).

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Naeem

Apr 15, 2019Naeem rated it it was amazing

Review of Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Saito shows that capitalism is the fount of our ecological problems. That therefore ecological problems are best understood through Marx’s framework. He wishes to overcome the stereotype held by many ecologists who see Marx as a naïve Promethean – as someone who believes that humans can overcome all natural limits. He builds on the work of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett whose books revive the overlap between ecological concerns and Marxism. But Saito claims to go further by showing how ecological concerns are essential for Marx’s critique of political economy, his critique of capitalism, and his vision of the future.

The point for Saito is to show how ecology and Marxism are indispensable to each other:

"I will demonstrate that Marx’s ecological critique possesses a systematic character and constitutes an essential moment within the totality of his project of Capital. Ecology does not simply exist in Marx’s thought—my thesis is a stronger one. I maintain that it not possible to comprehend the full scope of his critique of political economy if one ignores its ecological dimension.” [I read this in a format that makes page numbers variable, so no page numbers, sorry.]

I found Saito’s analysis compelling and submitted totally to the details of his analysis. He re-reads notebooks written in the later parts of Marx’s life and shows that Marx’s Promethean optimism was supplanted by his extensive exploration of the natural sciences in order to show how capital accumulation is limited by nature itself. The book is clearly written and well argued. It also illuminates elements well beyond Saito’s explicit themes, for example: Marx’s takes on alienation, religion, value, technological development, and socialism/communism.

I find Saito convincing in the same way I find Foster’s and Burkett’s books compelling. The relationship between humans and nature is foundational for Marx’s entire corpus. Indeed, implicitly or explicitly, every philosophy has to come to terms with this relationship. It is just that Hegel and Marx are explicit with their takes on this relationship.

My problems concern Saito’s willingness, indeed his eagerness to remove the Hegelian elements in Marx’s work. My critique of Saito amounts to one claim: he underplays Marx’s commitments to showing the positive side of capitalism. Saito himself quotes Marx as wishing to show, “the great civilizing influence of capitalism.” And, yet this influence is downplayed by Saito in order to turn Marx into a figure made ready for contemporary popular needs.

If, as I suspect, Saito hides Marx’s Prometheanism, I wonder what might count as a defense of Prometheanism. I aim to provide one below.

Saito wants to analogized how capital treats labor with how capital treats nature. On the face of it, there is perhaps no problem here: both are subjected to the logic of profit making and capital accumulation; both are made subservient to the principle of quid pro quo; both are treated as “fictional commodities” – to use Polanyi’s language.

Saito claims that nature “suffers” just like workers suffer. And, that as the necro-economics of capitalism create a kind of death for laborers, so also capitalism kills nature. I don’t think this analogy holds. We can ascertain human suffering by speaking directly with humans. Not so for nature; nature never tells us anything directly. Any understanding of nature’s suffering requires humans speaking for nature – a speaking which cannot be separated from particular human politics.

The second problem with this analogy is that while humans can die, we can even extinguish our own species (and many more besides). But this is not true for nature -- it cannot die. We can change nature, we can transform it, but we cannot kill it. Not only does this claim violate the first law of thermodynamics (not necessarily a problem for me since I don’t believe in the second law), it also misunderstands the enormity of nature relative to the human. If Saito means that humans can transform the planet so that it is no longer inhabitable by humans or even by all animal species then this is what he should say. The “death of the planet” is only a death for a limited part of nature, not for nature itself.

The question we can ask is why Saito is unable to say this. Why insist on the analogy between labor’s death and nature’s death? This loose use of language either betrays his otherwise tight argument. Or, it betrays his anxiously tight grip on making sure that a Marxian analysis does not slip towards Hegelian ideas.

How so? I will come to that. But first a third problem.

Saito admits that humans differ from other animals because their interaction with nature is self-conscious. Human interaction with nature is called “labor”:

“Marx argues that human beings are decisively different from other animals due to their unique productive activity, that is, labor. Labor enables a “conscious” and “purposive” interaction with the external sensuous world…”

“…it is only humans who are able to change their purposeful interaction with nature in the process of natural and social metabolism.”

Labor allows nature to be, as Saito says, “linked to itself;” and therefore labor humanizes nature. The following logic rests behind these claims, a logic that Saito implies but is uneager to expose:

Nature creates many species; nature creates the human species; nature creates the species that performs labor; labor allows nature to be “linked to itself”; and, labor “humanizes nature.” Therefore, nature creates a species whose purpose to transform and humanize nature.

Another way to say this is as follows: the teleology of nature and humans is bound together. Nature produces the species whose purpose it is to transform nature. Therefore, nature’s purpose is to transform itself via humans. Capitalism act as the dynamic force that brings this change into its hyperactive phase and most productive phase.

All this is implicit and often explicit in both Hegel and in Marx. Saito cannot make too much of this because, stated as such, there is no negative charge to capitalism’s transformation of nature.

Indeed, that charge can be read as positive in the following way: “Capitalism is the means by which nature transforms itself via human institutions. This transformation changes nature from being a brute fact which cannot be accounted for or known thoroughly into something that results from the aesthetic designs of humans. Humans can know nature because they have re-created it.”

It can also be read neutrally: “Capitalism is the means that nature uses to transform itself. However, we do not yet know if human design will change nature for the better or for the worse.”

It is this positive or neutral charge that Saito has to disavow if he is to keep faith with what he thinks of as Marx’s critique political economy. The positive or neutral relationship between capitalism and nature would, thinks Saito, go against Marx’s spirit, and certainly against the mainstream of ecological thinkers (except those taking an explicitly Hegelian line, such as James Lovelock, Frederick Turner, or Murry Bookchin).

For me, much depends on the temporal span within which we make these arguments. If the temporal span is long or infinite then Marx’s Promethean commitments come to full view. Marx rightly rages against the arguments for scarcity provided by Malthus and Ricardo. He understands that scarcity is created not by nature but by society, specifically by the commitment to hierarchy. It is hierarchy that creates scarcity. Displacing the construction of hierarchy to nature makes hierarchy eternal.

There is no denying these elements of Marx as they are a valuable part of his heritage. To his credit Saito highlights these parts of his work. Nevertheless, the grounding of scarcity in society presents a danger; it can make Marx seem a Promethean. Here Saito shows his trump card: those who would do so have to explain why Marx spent so much of his energies trying to find the limits of capital in nature in the later part of his life – the parts of Marx’s life that Saito examines so carefully.

Here I think my explanation of temporal span adds to Saito’s. Suppose we say that Marx worked within three temporal horizons. The first I have mentioned, the infinite abstract theoretical space of logic. Here, scarcity is created by social hierarchy the solution to which is the infinite abundance of human creativity. But Marx can be read to consider two other temporal spans. At first, he seemed to believe that the collapse of capitalism was imminent. When the revolutions around 1848 did not produce the kind of changes he anticipated, he pushed back his idea of how long it might take for capitalism to collapse. It was perhaps this search of this middle range temporal collapse that motivated his search for locating the natural limits of industrial agriculture via the study of the natural science, especially organic chemistry.

My explanation keeps intact, the Hegelian influences in Marx’s thought – especially the rejection of scarcity as nature-given (in the long run) while also explaining Marx’s commitment to a search for the limits of capitalism in nature (in the medium run).

One can have it both ways: Marx the Hegelian with a teleological view of human and natural history which validates human creativity and undermines the convenient assumption of natural scarcity. With Marx the profound critic of capitalism whose political economy and ecology are one.

Saito brings out the logical simultaneity of Marx’s ecology and his political economy. This is his gift to us. But to the degree that Saito feels it necessary to hide Marx’s Hegelian, teleological, and aesthetic themes, the cost of highlight Marx the ecologist is a loss of faith and confidence in Marx’s fuller corpus. This anxiety is the Lacanian Real of Saito’s book.

At the end of the day, I can boil down to these questions: does capitalism only “distort” human purpose? Or does it both “distort” and “realize” that purpose? To assert the distortion without exploring the realization is, I want to assert, to have misunderstood the difference between capitalism and capital. That is, it is not to have understood the difference between the becoming and the being, between the history and logic of wealth production.

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Andrew

Apr 01, 2019Andrew rated it it was ok

Shelves: political-science, history

I'm guessing this book was not for me. For your reference, I am a public policy Master's student and a Marxist who is not totally opposed to anarchism. I'm currently taking a class on Contemporary Marxism in the lit department where we are discussing completely arcane concepts from many Italian authors, in addition to some classics like Black Marxism. Now that you know where I'm coming from, you know how to measure the rest of this review.

I understand what Saito is trying to do here. He badly wants to convince us that Marx cared about ecology. Which. . . okay?

In other words, let's say he succeeded (spoiler: I'm not saying he succeeded): then so what? Where does that leave us? What does it change? What does it matter? Nowhere does Saito say how this new revelation should shape our behavior going forward. He certainly doesn't explain how it should inform any modern ecological practices. If I'm not mistaken he doesn't actually reference praxis at all. This is as puzzling as it is disappointing in a book called Karl Marx's Ecosocialism which was written in 2017.

Let me repeat that statement: this is a book about ecosocialism WRITTEN IN 2017 which barely mentions the looming climate catastrophe. It is one of the most egregious examples of ivory tower head-up-your-own-assedness I've ever seen.

Ok, so maybe I'm being unfair here. Coming up with actionable steps to battle climate catastrophe was clearly not within Saito's stated scope for this project. I happen to think that makes his stated scope shitty, but hey that's a subjective call. A fairer question would be does Saito succeed within his scope? I'd argue that he doesn't.

Though I'm sure Saito himself would object to this characterization, he basically has two main claims. One is that Marx is unfairly maligned for his earliest writings in which he was cavalier about productivism, essentially ignoring the environmental impact of industrialization. The second is that he came to care deeply about ecology over the last decades of his life, which we would have seen if he had ever finished volumes 2 & 3 of Capital himself.

Saito mostly convinces on the first account, using Marx's notebooks to say that right around the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx began investigating agronomy and became extremely interested in soil health, deforestation, etc. Fine, I'll grant that. His earliest writings were written in ignorance and he changed his mind over time.

The second claim, however, is woefully unsupported. At the end of Part 2 I was left with the impression that the chief supports for this claim is that Marx really liked two agronomists named Liebig and Fraas. Which. . . okay? But Saito neglects to show where Marx incorporated these mens' beliefs outside of a few random passages in Capital and Grundrisse. And worse, he imputes meanings onto phrases that Marx used: -- "nature," "harmony," "unity," etc. -- which it's not at all clear that Marx meant in the same way we use them today. He certainly never mentions "sustainability" or "collapse" or "ecosystem." Ultimately, Saito wildly overstates his case that Marx was preoccupied with environmental issues.

I'll stop there since I'm not being nice. I was unimpressed with both Saito's goal and his execution. I'm giving an extra star for his impressive research, which was clearly painstaking and comprehensive. It just frustrates me endlessly to see brilliant people expend valuable brainpower on such navel-gazing tasks.

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HappyHarron

Dec 06, 2017HappyHarron rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: leftism

Fantastic analysis, refutes many popular conceptions about Marx's Prometheanism and theory of history. A must read for those interested in not only current scholarship on Marx but how Marx can contribute to leftist eco-politics today. (less)

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Colin

Mar 26, 2021Colin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Wow what a book.

I can't think of more important subject matter to concern yourself with in this day and age. Capital's constant search for profit and expansion threaten the only planet we can call home. Although he wrote almost 200 years ago no one has quite so dissected capitalism as Karl Marx. Love him or hate him his impact is undeniable as his ideas are still a topic of heated debate to this day.

Kohei Saito is clearly an expert on Marx and Marxism. The premise of this book is that Marx has been critiqued as being a Promethean, but Saito disagrees and uses previously unpublished Marx notebooks to show how Marx was formulating an ecological critique of capitalism, but unfortunately was unable to finish Capital to include it.

Warning! This is a person's PhD thesis. It is fairly dense. If you are not at least somewhat familiar with Marx and his theories it would be best to save this one for later. I consider myself pretty well versed in Marxism and I still spent a fair amount of time researching other philosophers and Marxists mentioned in the text. In addition to normal philosophers that will be discussed in a text like this you will also encounter a pretty big chunk of discussion of 19th century German agricultural scientists, mainly Justus von Liebig and Carl Fraas.

I don't have my copy with me while I'm writing this review, but there is some absolutely golden things tucked away in these pages if you're willing to put in the time. Our collective future could literally depend on people encountering and grappling with ideas like these.

4.5 stars. (less)